Burning Man 2008: The Poisoned Palace

We are back from the playa safe and (mostly) sound, and are readjusting to allergies and alarm clocks now. Reentry is never fun, but at least it's been fairly easy so far. Ten days in the desert is too long and not long enough.

I've been ruminating on what to write about this year's Burn; it's so hard to capture it in words and even harder to do so in less than a novel's length. I might be able to manage the former, but forgive me if I can't manage the latter. Brevity is not my strong suit.

So, as some of you know, Chris and I and three other intrepid souls (BLove, Momily, and Tombro) split from our former camp in March to begin our own camp, "The Poisoned Palace." For the entire spring and most of the summer, the five of us were it, so we all worked our tuchuses off to create something out of nothing. It's not a small task, creating a Burning Man camp, much less a theme camp: we had to plan for and put together the food, water, shade, power, grey water collection and shower facilities we would need for 10 days in a windy desert climate PLUS our camp's projects. And we had to do it for 15 people, even though we didn't have 15 when we started!

We spent a lot of time in the spring brainstorming to come up with a cohesive theme and a "look." BLove wanted to serve tea every morning and wanted to repeat his very successful foot reflexology workshops from last year. I wanted to do a bar at night (mainly because the child was coming with us and I knew I wouldn't be able to go out and play. Bar = party comes to us!). Tombro and Bold both had a ton of design ideas which they played with. So we put it all together and sent in our application to the Burning Man Placement team. This was the concept we sent them:

Sort of a faux Asian + fluorescent thing. Big Trouble in Little China meets Mad Scientist.

Well, this is how it came out when we built it:




Not bad, eh? The kanji on the top say "Enter. Drink. Alcohol. Forget." BLove's hunny painted those on for us, since she knows Japanese calligraphy.




On-playa, the Poisoned Palace had many faces. BLove ran his teahouse from 10am to 2pm every day, offering 5 or 6 different varieties for the community to enjoy. At night, we ran a bar from 10pm to 2am and served our signature house drink "Nerds" (so named because the flavor was that of a mouthful of rainbow Nerds candy + vodka). The drink was really, really popular - not too sweet, pleasantly tangy, and high in alcohol content. We also mixed other drinks with whatever had on hand at any given time, but Nerds are what folks came back again and again for.

In between the libationary activities, we offered some structured activities: BLove's foot reflexology workshops, a foot spa, and a workshop that I ran on making ojo de dioses (god's eyes). We also had some unstructured offerings including mah jongg, a glowing shadow wall (stand in front of it, light flashes, shadow stays behind), and a four square court, complete with a lop-sided, factory defect ball which we told players was the "advanced" ball. You'd be amazed at how many people chose that one over the regular balls.

The camp was truly successful. We had many repeat "customers" throughout the week. Some came to imbibe, some just came to hang out. Several of those folks were from the DPW (Department of Public Works... the folks who lay out the city's roads, build Center Camp, erect the Man, etc., etc.), which is kinda cool, since DPW folks are pretty hard core burners. People told us they loved our community space and that they felt welcomed when they came in. We carpeted the space to keep the dust down and to catch moop (Matter Out Of Place, aka anything not native to the playa, aka everything except dust). We lit the space with nylon bubble lanterns and multicolored christmas lights, and at night we had a black light which made everything pop and glow. We hung saris around the open edges of the chute to create a visual barrier. We provided futons and papasan chairs and large cushions for folks to sit on. We had a massage table provided by one of our campmates, Sierra, a massage therapist. We had a hookah on our central coffee table with some amazing, fruity, Bahraini shisha (tobacco) to smoke. The whole thing was really lovely and I'm damn proud of what our little camp accomplished.